One so seldom has the opportunity to report good news about labor unions that when two good things happen in the space of 24 hours that’s a triumph. The first is a rebuke to the incoming Trump administration. The second is an unacknowledged favor to it (but, more importantly, to the nation as well).
Item One is that the Service Employees International Union, reversing a bad decision 20 years ago to disaffiliate with the AFL-CIO, is rejoining the labor federation. Even Andy Stern, who as SEIU president took the union out of the AFL-CIO and sought (in the end, unsuccessfully) to build a rival federation called Change to Win with the Teamsters and five smaller unions, said Wednesday that this is “an appropriate time to unite SEIU’s strength with other unions.” The move will expand AFL-CIO membership from nearly 13 million to nearly 15 million. (Change to Win was a bust. It lost most of its affiliates, stopped calling itself a labor federation, and now operates as something called the Strategic Organizing Center.)
Item Two is that the International Longshoremen’s Association, or ILA, which represents dockworkers on the East Coast and in the Gulf of Mexico, reached a deal on a new contract, averting a second dockworker strike. The first strike, in October, lasted three days before a wage deal was reached under heavy pressure on management from the Biden White House, with further negotiations postponed until after the presidential election.
The SEIU’s rejoining the AFL-CIO was in the works long before the election, but SEIU President April Verrett told Dave Jamieson of The Huffington Post that Trump’s victory makes it “that much more important to come together, to organize workers, to build real power, because that’s our best offense in this moment.”
A longstanding debate within the labor movement has been how to balance union organizing campaigns against electing friendly politicians. The calculus is not a simple one. Union organizing is obviously more important, but it’s also much harder, especially during Republican administrations, which invariably impose regulations through the National Labor Relations Board that deliberately impede such organizing.
Helping to elect Democrats is an easier task, but apart from appointing a labor-friendly NLRB, Democratic presidents have in recent decades been lukewarm allies to organized labor. During the 2008 election, the Harvard economist and former Obama White House aide Jason Furman recently told The New York Times, candidate Barack Obama was instructed not even to say the words “labor union.”
Stern took the SEIU out of the AFL-CIO to shift resources from politics to organizing, at which he’d been extremely successful. But six years later, when I interviewed Stern for my book The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It, he was less interested in touting his organizing success than in explaining to me how difficult it would be to replicate. “What we learned,” he said, “is you actually can grow, but the amount of input to get an output is so uneconomical. It probably costs us, in the nonpublic sector … $2000 to $3000 a member to organize. Sometimes as high as $5000 a member.” Stern told me this in 2011; in current dollars the figures he quoted would be $2700, $4000, and $6800.
Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers, committed himself to beating these odds, and he notched two high-profile wins last year in Tennessee, at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga and at a battery plant in Spring Hill; a third Tennessee facility, an electric vehicle plant in Glendale, filed for a union election this week.
But Fain also put his heart and soul into trying to elect Kamala Harris president, because the partisan stakes have never been higher than they were in 2024. Unlike Obama, Biden lent stronger support to labor than any president since Harry Truman (possibly to a fault in halting Nippon Steel’s purchase of U.S. Steel on dubious national-security grounds). Trump, despite enjoying strong working-class support, had an unusually dismal record on labor during his first administration, even for a Republican, and of course he made it personal, saying, for instance, that then-AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka “represented his union poorly…. It is easy to see why unions are doing so poorly.” (For the record, the AFL-CIO is not a union, it’s a federation of 61 unions.)
One labor leader for whom Trump maintains a soft spot is Harold Daggett, the president of the ILA. Daggett is a Trump fan even though it’s virtually certain that had Trump been president during the October dock strike he would have used his powers under the Taft-Hartley law to halt it—something Biden refused to do. Daggett kept his union neutral in the presidential race, which (like Teamsters President Sean O’Brien’s same move after he was invited to speak at the Republican convention) amounted to a sotto voce Trump endorsement. Trump rewarded Daggett by endorsing Daggett’s anti-automation stance in contract negotiations. Now Daggett is saying Trump “gets full credit” for averting the second dockworkers’ strike.
That’s a bald-faced lie. The truth is that the Biden administration, in hammering out an agreement, averted the dockworkers’ threat to go out on strike a second time on January 16, four days before Trump’s inauguration. It wouldn’t astonish me to learn that Trump’s team told Daggett that if he didn’t credit Trump then Trump would denounce the deal as yet another Biden sellout, killing Daggett’s chances of securing the necessary ratification from ILA’s rank and file. I have no evidence that this happened, but we all know Trump routinely stoops that low. Since National Economic Council director Lael Brainard, Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su, and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who played a central role in hammering out the maritime deal, don’t likely feel at liberty to say the following to Trump, allow me to say it for them. You’re welcome, asshole.
